The Genre of ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ by Mona E. McAlpine

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER It would be unreasonable and unrealistic to ask for a more detailed search than that which Professor Lewis has carried out. One can quibble with the placement of notes at the ends of chapters, a more inconvenient spot than at either the foot of each page or at the end of the volume; one can regret the absence of running heads, especially in the edition itself. But these are matters probably decided by the University of Georgia Press. Much of the material in the volume is authoritative, as Lewis argues: he has consulted (but not collated) all but four of the 672 known manuscripts, he has likely exhausted the question of title variations, and he has provided much information concerning variant readings. Still, a critical edition of De Miseria continues to promise greater usefulness than does his unemended transcription of a "typical" manuscript that dates from within fifty years of Innocent's writing De Miseria. In no way do I mean to question the integrity of Professor Lewis' work in the way I have questioned some of his procedures and conclusions, but I am at a loss to say who could find this book of use. It purports to be neither what Innocent wrote nor what Chaucer read. The elaborate and extensive apparatus does not in any reasonably simple way provide retrievable information. The text itself is based on a manuscript that has no authority of any kind. Thus the first volume of the Chaucer Library demonstrates that it is impossible to establish all ofthe texts ofChaucer's library. At those points at which De Miseria seems to be the source for Chaucer's poetry, the text of Lewis' edition differs in no substantial way from Maccarrone's. It is not simply that Chaucer's manuscript of De Miseria has not been found; more to the point, it appears that there is insufficient evidence on which to base so extensive a search. It is still not clear whether Chaucer used De Miseria or instead got his materials from some other source. This edition calls into question whether it is feasible to expect that we can recover all of Chaucer's library. DANIEL SILVIA University of California, Davis MONA E. MCALPINE, The Genre of 'Troilus and Criseyde.' Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978. Pp. 252. $12.50. Chaucer's reference to Troilus and Criseyde as "litel myn tragedie" ought to have established the genre of his poem. But, from Sydney's time 172 REVIEWS to our own, no definition of tragedy proposed has satisfied all readers as the correct accounting of Chaucer's generic procedure in the poem itself. Indeed, some critics have ignored this designation and found the poem more like a romance, or a novel, or an epic, or some combination of genres. McAlpine offers a new and consistent reading of Chaucer's generic intentions, one which takes into account the fact that his reference to tragedy appears quite late in the poem as the tentative attribution of a persona who has never been quite sure of his poetic bearings. This persona, she says, has been making rhetorical gestures in the direction of a de casibus tragedy modeled on Boccaccio: a tragedy of Fortune, or a tragedy of the proud man. His poem, however, has concentrated on the spiritual changes in lovers, not on material prosper­ ity and decline, and he has devoted nearly equal attention to Criseyde, who is not the principal victim of Fortune nor the proud man. His attribution, therefore, does not account for his practice. But Chaucer, who created him, had serious reasons for calling the poem a tragedy, and for referring to comedy in the next line. As a searching student and translator of the Consolation ofPhilosophy, he had invented and written the first truly Boethian tragedy and comedy, the structure of which is philosophically justified by the nature of the choices his two central characters make. McAlpine's solution to the generic problem thus defines tragedy in such a way as to solve many other problems of recent Troilus scholarship, those raised by the intrusive and vacillating narrative persona, by the centrality of love as his...